DVD,Blu ray or Hard drive or USB stick

Times seem to be changing and as I save all my home movies on Blu ray at present previously they were on DVDs Now I was wondering what the opinions are of other alternatives especially considering longevity .
It appears to me that Video shops are dissapearing , everyone seems to be downloading or streaming movies are any sort of discs slowly becomming obsolete.?
Obviously the home family movies are very important to me as I want them for my family after I have long gone .
What do the experts think of the future ?
I note that Sony appears to be proceeding with 4k disc ect but it looks like even Panasonic's Blu ray recorder is no longer being made as It is no longer on their web site and as far as I know no other manufacturer is making Blu ray recorders apart from recorders for computers of course.

I think that the future, for now, is the hard drive. It will store any and all projects so that they can be rendered to new technology standards as those emerge. It will continue to be understood by your computer even after your favorite technology has faded away, and it will be able to stream as long as you need that technology. You can update the media and migrate material so that you will always be able to produce your story in the latest format, and it will enable you to move your data to new storage mediums so that you will always be able to support the latest technology.

Thanks for your input.
You are probably correct however I always worry about Hard drives ?
They are usually guaranteed for around 5 years and I have had them fail in less than that,
I am not sure about the newer SSD hard drives as they have mot been around long enough to find out ?

I have found that digital media requires more attention to preserve than film/paper. Hard drives may be the most flexible option today, but you will need to keep transferring it to a current technology as hard drives do fail in a short period of time, as you pointed out. It is getting hard to find a computer to read firewire drives, much less the older IDE and SCSI interfaces of not that long ago in terms of archival storage. I have some film slides from my grandfather that had been sitting neglected for decades, back to the 1950's. A cheap Epson flatbed scanner is able to read them in with nice color for their age. I'm not sure when the time comes if my grandsons would be able to retrieve data from hard drives that had been neglected for decades.

So for now, use hard drives and don't neglect your media for too long.

I never, ever trust my data to one hard drive. I always maintain backups of my files on a second hard drive. My thought is that one hard drive may fail at any time, but the probability of two failing at exactly the same time is too low to justify the cost of a third backup copy. In addition, the backup drives are not online all day long, so their useful lives will be longer than the active drives.

It is true that paper has great longevity, but that doesn't help much for preserving video and audio.

Thanks for the input so I will save my DVDs/Blu rays on Hard drives.
Now what I need to know is if I just copy the dvds/Blu rays from the original discs I end up with DVD/Vob files etc ot Blu ray M2ts files that's fine but I cannot play these files on my TV if I plug the hard drive it ??
What is the best way to save my movies after I have edited them and put titles on etc so I can play them at full quality 1080x 1920 on my TV but still make discs off them if necessary ?

[Peter Brown]"Now what I need to know is if I just copy the dvds/Blu rays from the original discs I end up with DVD/Vob files etc ot Blu ray M2ts files that's fine but I cannot play these files on my TV if I plug the hard drive it ??"

No, your TV won't know what to do with these. This is why I recommended you stick with Blu-ray and DVD discs and not hard drives.

[Peter Brown]"What is the best way to save my movies after I have edited them and put titles on etc so I can play them at full quality 1080x 1920 on my TV but still make discs off them if necessary ?"

Personally I would continue to make Blu-ray disc. If you want to make media files from these you can rip the disc to MP4 later. Since MP4 is usually lower quality than Blu-ray it's harder to go the other way around (i.e., render as a media file and then make a Blu-ray later)

Hi John
I l like your reply as I have never had a problem with Blu ray discs failing after some time like I have had DVDs failing as they get older .
However If I go into a TV retail store I see new 4k tvs showing "demo" movies that are of excellent quality and stored on a hard drive ( because they are not available on disc anyway).
How do they obtain this high quality 4k footage? what render format are they using on their Hard drives that plays on tvs?

[Peter Brown]"I have never had a problem with Blu ray discs failing after some time like I have had DVDs failing as they get older."

I've never had a problem with DVD's not playing as they get older. Do you put paper labels on your DVD's? DVD's should outlast you.

[Peter Brown]"How do they obtain this high quality 4k footage? what render format are they using on their Hard drives that plays on tvs?"

I would ask them. I don't have a 4K camera or TV so I don't know. I do know that the 4K Sony cameras shoot XAVC. I don't know if 4K TV's can play this format natively. Like I said, I would ask them. I'm sure the salesman would be happy to sell you whatever it is that works. ;-)

Personally, I would stick with some form of optical media, DVD or Blu-ray and a player that can play them for long term storage. Be careful with hard drives; they fail far too often. They can fail simply by sitting in a draw and not being used! That is a scary thought. Nothing has really replaced optical discs for long term storage. If you do use hard drives as storage, you'd better keep multiple copies on several drives. I store my videos on both a RAID 5 array and individual disks. This way if one fails I have the other as backup and the RAID has redundancy.

Again, personally i would not go with Optical media (DVD, BLU-RAY).
Yes, hard-drives fail at times, but the ratio of a hard-drive failing
is far less to occur than your DVD, Bluray getting corrupt or unreadable.

Too much in my past, i save my media on Discs, and in a year or two of
proper storage, only to find most of them unreadable or unable to extract
the contents from them.
Storing them on several of my old external Hard-drives and dusting them
off after a year or two, everything is nice and intact, not to mention the
numerous amount of Discs i would have to use to store the many Gigabytes
of media that i have..... Hell No!